


Narudare

by Jedibrarian



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Din Djarin - Freeform, F/M, Force-Sensitive Original Character(s), The Child - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25023364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jedibrarian/pseuds/Jedibrarian
Summary: "Narudare”- Mando’a, temporary allies, enemies of a common enemy.Charged with reuniting a Force-sensitive foundling of unknown species with its kin, the Mandalorian recruits the only other ‘sorcerer’ he’s ever met, an asset he captured for the Empire early in his career.
Relationships: The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	1. Chapter 1

The Mandalorian had a foundling, a commission to return it to its kin, and despite himself, no plan and no clue for how to proceed.

Initial attempts to identify the Child by species failed. The Armorer had suggested that its strange abilities were characteristic of a people called the Jedi, and he’d undertaken research on them as a starting point. Information on these sorcerers was thin on the ground, though, and scarcer yet when one tried to separate fact from wild confabulation. The historical enemy of his people, like his people, had been lately persecuted by the rise of the Empire. Few had relevant knowledge even before the propaganda campaigns and the fear of reprisal complicated the search for answers, and for those who did, reticence was a hard-to-break habit. A university librarian on Raltiir, who had laughed harder than he thought strictly necessary, corrected his assumption that all Jedi were knee-high, gundark-eared, and green. Like Mandalorians, they could be drawn from any race. While that absolved him of the need to locate a tribe of beings that no resource he consulted and no subject-matter expert he contacted had ever seen before, it created a new problem- the search parameters had exploded from no one to potentially anyone.

Later that evening, while the bulkheads of the Razor Crest vibrated in sympathetic outrage with the Child’s complaints because he had prevented it from dropping everything not bolted down into the vac-head for the fourth time that day, it occurred to him that he might have an idea of whom to consult next. He’d met the contact early in his hunting career, and it had ended so bizarrely, he’d done his best to block it out of his memory in the meantime. But discomfort was becoming second nature, and any lead was preferable to scrabbling around for the single grain he needed in two tons of scorching Nevarran sand.

The job had looked a little suspect from the start. As advertised, it was a straightforward, preferably live apprehension of a human female, about fifteen standard years old, from an off-grid farming commune on Dantooine’s sprawling, empty Khoonda plains. At first he’d ignored it; the assignment was far enough out of his way that the pay barely compensated for travel time, fuel, and the likelihood of being obliged to wait out checkpoints or inspections along the route. The file sat in the back of the queue over several weeks, the number of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors of record metastasized, and the payout on offer steadily grew. In his experience, the former indicated probable Imperial involvement, and the latter meant that the job was more complicated than advertised. Eventually he ran out of more attractive prospects. A job that began as a well-organized, cooperative engagement on Alzoc-3 devolved into a barely-salvaged, chaotic scramble. After that, a solitary, simple gig, even one with a long commute, sounded like a welcome change.

He put the Crest down on a cracked, rutted landing pad. The precipitously-tilting remains of a sunken, four-spired compound loomed over a brick-bordered expanse of weeds that might’ve been a temple precinct in ages past, an expanse of fallow hills and neat, square tracts of farmland. Standing on the loading ramp, he surveyed the area, first with a set of quadnoculars, second with the infrared sensors in his helm. He found no present or recent indications of sentient activity- deeply suspicious at the height of planting season. He slung the Amban over his shoulder, ran a quick mental check on his other armaments, and set off in the direction indicated by the tracking fob.

The further he progressed into the settlement, the more unsettling the scene became. Not only were there no workers about the usual chores, he saw no livestock, heard no wild animals. For once in his life,the sight of survey droids or automated harvesters might have been welcome, but there were none to be found.

His prior intelligence-gathering had indicated that the Sandral stakehold was a haven for deserted troops, refugees, and asylum-seekers, fleeing the last gasp of the Clone Wars or the magma-like subsumptive spread of the Empire. That information seemed suspicious; usually communities of bucolic non-combatants didn’t put up enough resistance to warrant a large and growing bounty. Now he saw that he wasn’t looking at a pacifist enclave so much as a competent, well-prepared army under siege.

Something crunched under his boot. He lifted his foot to find a human scapula and the blasting cap from a buried explosive. Flowering weeds were already sprouting in the crater. He looked up and noted that the landscape was dotted with similar scars. Fifteen careful paces later, a toe scuffed against the chitinous shell of a very large dead arthropod. Similar fragments carpeted a dip in the ground, hard packed earth covering what he guessed had once been the entrance to a nest. A neat stack of bundles wrapped in shining fibers and assembled on one side of the hollow were, he belatedly realized, not bales of livestock feed. He passed the blast-scarred head of a cistern. The jagged line painted over the cover and the reek emanating from under it indicated that it had been repurposed as a mass grave.

The tracker led him to a squat, sprawling compound sunken into the top of a hill. He made a wide circuit around the facility, noting fortifications, armaments, and a faint infravision impression of the sentients inside. The disarticulated carcass of an Imperial troop transport sprawled across the landing pad on the roof, and the massive front door had been welded shut. A small service bay door to the rear looked like a more likely prospect.

He had a breaching charge placed and partly armed when the door to the compound shot open from under his hands. A human adolescent, raw-boned and hollow-eyed, slid out and squinted into the light. Her hair was darkened and matted down with sweat, and between the grime and healing bruises, her natural skin tone was hard to determine. Even from behind his helmet, he could tell that she hadn’t had the opportunity to bathe or change clothes in a long time.

“Atash Anteros?”

She scowled and flapped her hands at her soot-smudged, much-mended tunic “No, the queen of Naboo, can’t you tell?”

A wail rose from inside the house. Sighing, she shut the door again, abruptly cutting it off.

She peered into the void of his visor for a long moment with beskar-gray eyes. “I know why you’re here,” she said finally. “Let’s get on with it.”

Unsettled and uncertain whether his blaster was the better thing to be grabbing, he reached for the binders on his belt.

She spat something that sounded midway between a cough and a curse. “Do unarmed children usually give you much trouble?”

He shrugged off the taunt in silence, reclaimed and stowed the explosives. She blundered past him with the unsteady, wobbling gait of someone who’d spent a long time in confinement. His hand hovered by his holster.

“You want a fight, so that this feels worth your effort.” she commented without turning around. “Given the armor, that tracks. Should have come earlier.” She jerked her head to the side. A combine thresher, cockpit shot out and internals still smoldering, was augured into an embankment a few yards away. He counted several pairs of stormtrooper limbs caught in its tines

The sheer surreality of the scene outweighed his usual professional reticence ”How much earlier?”

She shot a bleary, quizzical glance at the horizon. “Siege started in earnest, what, about ten weeks ago? Maybe closer to twelve. This is my first trip outside in about four.” She sidestepped the buckled remains of an Imperial helmsman’s cuirasse embedded in the dirt. “Can’t say much for the re-landscaping that’s been done in the meantime.”

Her blithe demeanor was undercut by evident exhaustion. She stumbled and nearly fell three times on the way back to the ship. He threw out an arm to catch her each time. Each time she acknowledged the gesture with a sharp nod.

They arrived within sight of the Razor Crest and he keyed in the remote-unlock sequence on his vambrace, watching her carefully for a sudden change of bearing. “No holding cell on the ship. You’ll be placed in carbon freeze.” he said.

If anything, she looked even less poised to fight or flee. Maybe just more tired. “It will be nice to sleep, finally.” she replied, earnestly wistful. “I’m so tired of…” she tilted her head to indicate the heaps of wrecked machinery and disturbed turf and the half-toppled temple “…all of this.” She faced the tumbledown remains of the temple and bent forward slightly in an approximation of a bow, then looked to him to lead on.

He ushered her up the loading ramp and into the ship. He thought she’d belatedly made up her mind to fight when she stopped a few steps into the hold with her hands out, fingers splayed; it turned out that she hadn’t adjusted to the sudden reduction in light. He guided her toward and around into the mobile freezing unit with one hand on her shoulder and the other close to his blaster.

She edged forward. There was the resistance he was expecting. He caught her arm and pressed her back into the freezing chamber’s frame with an annoyed grunt.

Her free hand darted out in a blur, and found a sliver of bare skin under his vambrace, between his gauntlet and the sleeve hem of his hauberk. Her fingertips connected, and a silent, invisible explosion ripped through him. His ears buzzed. The deck tilted and fell away from beneath his boots. The hand that should have unholstered and fired his pistol in a fraction of a second refused to respond.

He heard her breathing, her heartbeat alongside his. His familiar, comfortable armor grew crowded and airless, as if she’d not so much destroyed as infiltrated it, crawled into it with him. Sparks bloomed behind his eyes and resolved into images from elsewhere: a procession of motley Guild hunters, Imperial infantry and featureless, faceless suits of black armor collided with farmers and artisans. Torrents of plasma fire and arcs of strange glowing, chakram-hilted staves cut through a poisonous haze of weaponized fertilizer and pesticide. Light artillery cut ragged wounds into farmland already scarred by improvised fortifications and hastily-excavated graves.

He jerked his hand away with a yelp and slammed down the button to engage the carbon freeze.

 _“Beroya, Returcye’mhi.”_ she murmured through the hissing gas. _Maybe we’ll meet again, Hunter._

“Huh?”

The asset’s features froze into a coldly direct, level stare. She wouldn’t be able to clarify how a ragged Outer-Rim dirt farmer learned to speak the language of his people. He sagged against the control panel, chest heaving, dashing at his visor with shaking hands.

 _What the hell are you?_ he mouthed silently between gasps.

The rush of blood in his ears reassembled itself into her voice. _I don’t know. We’ll see._

Fighting a gut-stab of pure panic, he ventured a furtive glance at the carbonite slab. She stared, as before.

He bit off a curse and stumbled back to the cockpit. The slab remained in the chamber, and he avoided even walking past it for the duration of the four-day flight to Dubrillion.

He dug back through his archives of old chain code data. Twenty years was a long time; she might be anywhere. She might be dead. The problem of the Child entirely aside, a small part of him hoped she was. He’d spent a long time agonizing over whether…whatever she’d done, whatever she might have seen when she touched him constituted a breach of the Creed. He hadn’t told the Armorer or anyone else, out of fear of the consequences, fear of ridicule because an unarmed serf who was barely strong enough to stand had counted coup on him, fear that he’d finally taken one too many hits to the head and the whole impossible episode had been a hallucination.

After a very long gap in her record, there was a ping on Doniphon, then Kestis Minor. Most recently, a derelict orbital station near Telos IV. He held out his hand. The Child persisted in its experiments with jamming a spare tracking fob into the Razor Crest flight controls, up its nostrils, and into the corners of his visor. He offered a doll he’d improvised out of a hydrospanner and a string of jingling metal washers tied with shreds from his cape, and the Child made the trade with a shriek of glee. With a deep breath and a few decisive taps on the terminal, he programmed the tracking fob, then laid in a course on the navicomp. They were bound for Telos.


	2. Chapter 2

“Where you headed?” The proprietress of the commissary eyed the armor-plated Mandalorian, presently spooning stew into the mouth of the bat-eared homunculus balanced on his knee, with a mix of wariness and fascination.

He jerked his head vaguely in the direction of the door and the taiga rolled out around the resupply depot. “TSF’s got a vornskr problem along the polar irrigation line. Going up to survey, maybe solve it.” 

“A hunter, then. Don’t know of vornskr up there since years ago; watch out for the witch though.” 

“The what,” he nearly dumped the contents of the spoon down the child’s cowl.

She tutted under her breath “Seen plenty of other hunters tear-ass up the irrigation line after this or that. They come back the color of ash, bawling about a woman who can conjure storms, blink through hyperspace without a ship, rewrite peoples’ memories-“

He snorted.

“Scoff if you want, just be careful. Telos was an Agricorps world. Jedi worked this land for ages, and the land remembers them.” The Child grabbed the spoon and began wagging it around, broadcasting a fine spray of stew across the table while his attention was diverted. 

“Anj, you entertaining visitors with flagrant lies again?” An older woman in a flour-spattered apron burst out of the kitchen and slapped a sheet pan of flatbreads down on the countertop. “Some people like their privacy, and they don’t bother anyone who doesn’t bother them,” she said, addressing the owner but looking at him. “Nothing wrong with that.” 

“Prosh, you were right here for the last one, what, a month ago? Didn’t think your memory had got that bad.” Anj made a show of flouncing over and replacing his untouched, cold mug of caf with a near-boiling one. “Thought we were going to have to scrape that Umbaran off the ceiling, he was so worked up. Did you see the condition his armor was in? Helmet looked like it had been through a hailstorm” 

“He was worked up alright,” Prosh rolled her eyes. “Worked up on unfamiliar atmospheric conditions, a helmetload of bad spice, lack of basic manners and who knows what else. If you want to talk about brain-wasting disease, let me mention how quickly you’ve forgotten when your ‘witch’ rescued Brego’s son and brought him back after he broke down in the blizzard last winter, or who makes the medicine for your mother’s joint-ail.”

The paging chit on the table buzzed; his ship was repaired and refueled. He gathered the Child, mopped up its mess, stacked some credits on the table, and left the women to their argument. 

The access trail following the irrigation line to its polar hub was barely more than a shoulder-wide gap in the scrub, bracketed by spindly, leaning evergreens. Uneasy with the prospect of losing the Child in groundcover twice its height, he tucked and pinned his cape into a makeshift carrier and slung the little one against his side. 

After walking for most of an hour with little change in the scenery, the tracking fob led them under an arch formed by several half-toppled trees. Somehow it reminded him of crossing under the Mythosaur into the Armorer’s forge. The Child startled when they walked through and several birds- funny little round-bodied owls with long tails and eyes that flashed gold, took flight bare feet from his face. 

An expanse of bright cyan showed through the tree cover. As they drew closer, it resolved into a length of fabric wound onto the beam of a tall warp-weighted loom, leaning against the wall of a wattle-woven shelter. The weaver stretched above her head to beat the weft, then reset the heddle bar. When she turned for another pass with the shuttle, he realized he’d found Atash Anteros.

She was barely recognizable as the gaunt, filthy creature he’d captured on Dantooine. Her skin was tan and freckled. A wildly-curling halo of ruddy brown hair surrounded her face and extended down her back. Her long saffron coat and rust-red trousers contrasted sharply with the swath of vivid blue-green cloth on the loom

The Child tipped out of its sling before he could prevent it and took off across the gap between them at a sprint. 

“Aaaand what’s this?” The shuttle went slack in her hand.

It hauled itself up onto the verandah, stretched up on tiptoe and raised its arms to her with a joyful squeal.  
She bent, picked it up, and lowered her forehead to touch its own. “Thank you for coming to visit me, friend. What’s the occasion?”

It made an elaborate gurgling noise and swung one three-clawed hand out in his direction. He froze mid-step. For a hopeful couple of seconds, she didn’t appear to recognize him. Then her expression turned cold and hard. With his heart in his throat, he watched her twitch toward her side, then stop to avoid drawing over the baby’s head. That was usually his maneuver.

“Sucuy’gar, Beroya.” You’re alive, Hunter. 

He stepped forward with his hands up, fingers splayed, well above his holster. “Easy, We’re not here to hurt you.”

“Why are you here, then?” He remembered the girl who seemed to see through both carbonite and his visor as if through air, and tried not to shudder.

He sighed “We need your help.”

The Child made a low cooing noise, closed its eyes and placed its hand on her temple. 

She turned toward it and blinked rapidly. “I don’t usually take advice from people who shit into napkins, but in your case I can make an exception.” 

He waited in silence, shifting from foot to foot with exaggerated care.

“This one says you’re a good man,” she said slowly, with a tilt of the head and a skeptical expression, “and that you aren’t lying, so far. In which case, it’s getting dark. You’d better come inside.”

“Your Armorer isn’t wrong. This baby has the Force, and quite a lot of it.” Atash selected a jar from one of the high, crowded shelves lining the walls of the one-room shelter. “But if you’re looking for Jedi to give them to, that, I can’t help with. I’m not one. Don’t know of any living ones either.” The kettle squealed. She pulled it off the hob and deftly distributed the contents between two clay teacups. The Mandalorian, seated on the floor with the phase pulse rifle across his lap, nodded in acknowledgement when she placed one on the low table in front of him. “The Order was outlawed weeks before I was to begin training, and every surviving votary who could be found, killed.”

He stared at his folded hands in consternation for a moment “Who trained you?”  
She seated herself across from him. “Before we met? No one.”

“After?”

“Long, boring story.” She made an airy, dismissive gesture with one hand. “Ask me another time, like when you desperately need to sleep and can’t.”

He turned exaggeratedly slowly toward the Child standing beside him, making a noise like a flooded swoopbike engine through a mouthful of the tablecloth

“That’s fair,” she chuckled. She produced a flexible metal straw from the chest behind her, and set it down next to his untouched cup of tea. “This might help.”

It took some fiddling, but he managed to work the straw under the seal of his helmet and into his mouth. The tea was floral, spicy, and did seem to clear some of his accumulated soreness and fatigue.

“Are you still in the trade?” 

He grunted an affirmative

“Who cares for the baby while you’re working?”

“Want a job?”

“You’re joking.” She laughed. Wouldn’t be ethical; I don’t have the intel you need.” She tossed back most of her tea in a single gulp. “This one will want training eventually, but I’m not the person to undertake it. And as much as I treasure my privacy, I think you do too. I get on one nerve too many and, being neither two hands high nor cute, you sell me right back to whatever’s left of the Empire.”

He grasped in silence for a suitable reply. Said silence was interrupted by the Child’s attempt to drag the tablecloth and all of its contents onto the floor. “Hey, stop that!” He corralled the Child between his chest and the rifle on his lap.

“Wayii, havrap’ika!” she laughed. _Hey, little havrap!_ “You can clear the table after we’ve had tea.”

“Tion’vai aru’e hibir jorhaa’ir Mando’a?” he asked, ducking his head as if venturing a private aside in a crowded room. _Where does an adversary learn to speak Mandalorian?_

“Aru’e?” She snorted. “Nice. _Haar_ aru’e hibir teh kaysh Mando kir’man’bavodue.” This _adversary learned from Mandalorians in her extended surrogate family._

“In a farming commune?” He was incredulous

“In a formally-declared pacifist farming commune,” she repeated. “They got out in the chaos around the Siege. The way they told it, there’s a difference between going all-in for cause, for your family and your people, and carrying spears for omnicidal idiots.”

He thought back to the unusually competent defenses he’d seen at the Sandral stakehold. Now it made sense.

The Child grew restless, trying to climb his cuirasse foot-over-paw, making fussy noises, and swatting at his hands when he tried to resettle it in his lap. 

“I wish I had more information, or better news for you.” She said, beginning to consolidate the tea supplies. “Walking the irrigation line alone at night is a bad idea. You’re welcome to bunk here til morning, or if you’re itching to haul jets tonight, I’ll escort you back to the depot and pull up a corner of the commissary for a few hours. That ought to give Prosh and Anj something to jaw at credulous strangers about for a few-” She cut herself off and held up a finger for silence.

A faint, fast electronic beep sounded. 

He fished out the tracking fob he’d used to find her; it was inactive and silent. They nearly knocked heads in the rush to get to their feet. 

“Watch the kid.” He lifted the child onto the table and picked up the Amban. “I’ll handle it.”

He was barely across the threshold before he heard a faint pop, a shower of debris, and a bitten-off yelp. He ducked back inside to find the back wall breached and smoking. She was pinned under a snarling, speeder-sized animal with dark fur, a crocodilian snout, and a wickedly barbed tail. Two quick blaster rounds into the flank barely fazed it. It swung its head toward him and then turned back to its quarry. A beam of white light erupted from the base of its skull, then disappeared. The creature collapsed. 

“Where’s the baby?”

She pointed to the shelf above her head with her now-inactive weapon, an innocuous-looking metal cylinder. The Child peaked out from behind a row of tall bottles and trilled a greeting. 

“There’s the vornskr I was hunting. Thanks.” He helped heave the carcass off of her.

“Is there a finder’s fee?” She winced as she hauled herself to her feet. “Glad it found me first.” 

“Huh?”

She looked up at the Child, then threw a bewildered glance back at him. “Vornskrs’ favored prey is Force-sensitives. They’re used to hunt us.”

He recoiled as if he’d been hit. The hunt had been more pretext than earnest plan, but it had endangered the Child all the same. 

She noted his reaction and quietly forged ahead. “They’re social animals; we can expect at least one more. This one had help getting in from someone with thumbs. Tail barb’s intact; that keeps them aggressive, hard to control. Handler’s highly motivated and doesn’t care what disposition the target’s in when they’re through.”

He half-listened while he initiated the infrared optics in his helm. The woods outside the ragged new hole in the shelter were crowded with wildlife, but he was able to make out two humanoids grappling with two larger, quadrupedal targets. He loaded a gas cartridge into the breech of the Amban, shouldered it, and fired. One of the handlers dissolved into dust. The other dropped the reins in surprise. The vornskrs broke free and charged toward them. 

“We’ve got incoming.”

“I’ll try to keep out of your sights; if you see a shot, take it!” She ducked out onto the verandah.

Her weapon activated with a metallic snap. The remaining humanoid, apparently not expecting this development, ripped a holdout blaster out of their boot and fired wildly in their approximate direction. Two shots went wide of the shelter, another buzzed the roof. A fourth was on course to graze his helm. Her blade caught the bolt and turned it to strike an oncoming vornskr in the shoulder. He took advantage of the chaos to reload the phase pulse rifle and fire. The attacker exploded into fine fragments. 

She carefully whittled down the four-legged predators, keeping their attention while dodging teeth and tail barbs. The injured one darted for her side. She swung the blade down from her shoulder, forcing it to pivot away. He squeezed off three more quick pistol rounds into its rump as it turned. 

Then the world went sideways. He was knocked prone, vision dark and ears buzzing. He heard the groan of warping wood and the crash of shattering glass as if from far away. He lurched up onto his elbows. Stars shone through a new hole in the roof. The wall shelf hung from a single remaining hinge, and the Child was gone. 

“‘Roya!-“ her call was cut short by a cry of pain. A human in Imperial blacks fled past them into the scrub with a wriggling sack under his arm. One of the vornskr she’d been holding at bay broke off to chase them. She continued to grapple with the other, its tail barb embedded in her now-nerveless forearm.

He engaged the guided munitions in his gauntlet. The whistling birds screamed as they flew, striking the beast in the eyes. She wound the length of its tail around her arm, severed it at the base, pivoted around and struck off its head.

The kidnapper stumbled. With the remaining vornskr gaining ground and an unsteady but highly-motivated Mandalorian joining the chase, he decided to cut his losses. He heaved the sack overhand to his side and kept running. 

The Mandalorian dove after the parcel. He caught it and curled it to his chest just before the vornskr sent him sprawling. A jet from his flamethrower angered the beast; it chomped down on his vambrace, shook and slammed him to the ground, determined to dislodge its prey.

A crackling buzz sounded, then a pained shriek. The reek of charred flesh seeped into his helm. His arm fell free. He looked down; an electric arc crawled from the Child’s tiny paws and over the vornskr’s face. He seized the vibroblade from his boot, buried it under the creature’s jaw, and drove it in until the beast fell still. 

He gave the Child a quick once-over, got to his feet, and returned to the shelter. 

Atash was an eerie statue, underlit by the saber at her side, poised with a fist held up in front of her. Their assailant was frozen in place in front of her, back arched, face a rictus of anguish. “Beroya,” she said slowly, aligning the words with great effort. “Do you have anything to say to this heap of filth?”

“Nothing,” he spat.

“Take the Child, and cover their eyes.” 

The brigand emitted a stream of slurred, anguished noises. The Mandalorian backed away several paces with the Child cradled against his shoulder, then turned to block its view. There was a wet crunch, a thud, then silence.

The Child squirmed and complained until he set it on the ground. He watched it toddle away toward the debris that remained of the shelter.

“That last one? Imperial, not Guild.” she observed, shoulders sagging, suddenly looking exhausted.

“Yes.”

She stared at the wreckage of her home, eyes wide and watering, her injured arm hanging limp and the other hand pressed against her mouth. 

“I…I’m sorry. By now you’re accustomed to all of this.” Her voice cracked. “Fool that I am, I thought I was finished with it.” 

The Child returned, tugged at her trouser hem and burbled. She scooped it up. It offered her a smooth, torus-shaped stone wound with a length of bright cyan thread, a weight from her vitiated loom.

“Thank you, friend.” She said, choking down a sob. “It’s only things. It’ll mend.” She touched its forehead with hers. “You’re safe. That’s what matters.”

“I’m sorry.” he said. “I’d known they were tailing us, we wouldn’t have come. Please let me pay for the repairs, and help rebu-.”

“Too dangerous; They know you’re here now,” she cut in sharply. “They’ll keep coming. Take the baby and leave.”

“They know you’re here now too.”

“They weren’t after me!”

“Weren’t.” 

“I’ve managed,” she hissed. “Will manage.”

He studied her for a long moment in silence. “Aru’e, the job offer stands.” He angled his head toward the Child curled against her jaw. “The kid likes you.”

She reached up to scratch behind one of its ears. “Harboring an enemy…that doesn’t breach your honor?”

“Crossed that line once. What’s one more?” 

She nodded, evidently satisfied. “I can keep eyes on this one when you can’t, maybe some other things besides. I’m rusty at saber. Looks like opportunities to practice won’t be a problem.”

He snorted.

“My Imperial clearance is years out of date. Depending on the disposition of the Empire, though, it may not matter. That might expedite the search for the Child’s family, and keep you clear of unnecessary trouble.”

That item of intel suggested some follow-up questions. He chose to let them drop for the moment.

“Suffice it to say,” she said, taking a deep breath and straightening her spine, “If the Imperials want the Child, they’ll have to kill me first.”

If he’d been back in the covert on Nevarro, the appropriate response would have been “This is the Way.” On a world saturated with Jedi history, surrounded by the carcasses of Force-adept-hunting monsters, in the act of inducting a sorceress into his crew, the best he could muster was a grunt and a curt nod. 

Early-morning visitors to the resupply depot were greeted with a curious little procession trooping down from the irrigation line. Their first stop was at the TSF guard shack, where a bewildered constable exchanged three vornskr tail barbs for a tidy stack of credits. The Mandalorian turned and pressed them into Atash’s palm. “Finder’s fee.”

Next they visited a medcenter. Atash kept up a polite stream of banter, distracting herself from steroid injections and bacta patches, and diverting the medtech from gawking at the bat-eared munchkin in her lap or the Mandalorian hovering in the doorway of the closet-sized infirmary like an anxious, well-armed stormcloud.

Finally, they stopped at the commissary. Atash handed over a jar of liniment for Anj’s mother, miraculously salvaged from the remains of her home, and ordered a caf “big enough to bathe a baby in.” Anj and Prosh would have plenty to gossip about in the ensuing weeks, but until the Razor Crest left Telos, they simply stared.


End file.
